FOOD NEWS
Is In-N-Out's Special Sauce Just Thousand Island Dressing?
By Kalea Martin
The special sauce that adorns In-N-Out burgers and animal-style fries remains a mystery, and many wonder if it's actually Thousand Island dressing.
In-N-Out's website only includes allergen information, the nutritional value of a burger with the sauce, and that the recipe has been "unchanged since 1948," when they opened.
Because of similarities in color and taste, many people assume that In-N-Out's burger sauce is simply Thousand Island dressing — a blend of mayonnaise and ketchup.
Thousand Island is thicker and slightly spicier than In-N-Out sauce. In-N-Out clearly doesn't want to reveal the ingredients of its special sauce, but there may be some clues.
The allergen information says the sauce contains eggs but no milk. This would mean the sauce's creaminess likely comes from mayonnaise instead of a dairy product.
Most copycat recipes believe the other ingredient is ketchup, but on an In-N-Out Reddit thread, one customer claims that a batch of under-mixed sauce had a streak of tomato paste.
According to celebrity chef J. Kenji López-Alt, the other main ingredient is relish. He discovered this upon straining a packet of the sauce and found the green stuff left behind.